The Name of the Thing

The name of your social intranet or social business platform is important. It's what people should be entering into their browser everyday (if not bookmarked or set as their home page).  They should associate certain things with it.  It's a brand.  Don't be fooled into thinking it's anything else.

There's a philosophy out there that says the name of a thing (or person) has a huge influence on the nature of that thing.  My husband looked into it when we couldn't figure out why our amazingly beautiful cat, Zella, was so hostile.  She loved my husband, put up with me, and hissed and clawed at everyone else.  So one day my husband decided to look up what the name Zella meant and found out it was a German derivative for "the hostile one".  The name fit.  If he had only named her Fluffy or Rainbow we would have had a very different cat.


My point is that real thought should be put into the name of your social intranet.  Your end-users will associate negative or positive connotations you may have not thought through if you make the naming decision too quickly.  Some names I've seen used at multiple companies are "Connect", "Engage", "The Hub", "MyCompany", "OneCompany", and "The Mix".  The interesting thing about The Mix is one consumer products good company and one medical devices company both used that name.  The fun thing is they could both use slogans like "Mix it Up" or "Are you in the Mix?".  

Try to find something that plays off your company name, culture, or corporate mission.  You want to grab the hearts and minds of the end-user.  When I was at my last company I ran an idea campaign to crowdsource the name.  We ended up with Hal (a "2001: A Space Odyssey" reference for all of you non-geeks out there) as our new intranet name.  It was perfect.  It exemplified our company culture and by crowdsourcing the name got a lot more people invested in the name and the new intranet.  At my current company our intranet is called Brewspace.  It's another great play off the culture but also plays into the concepts of innovation and collaboration with the thought of brewing up ideas.

So please don't make your social intranet name an afterthought.  If you don't have a brain that works that way (mine doesn't) bring in some brains that do.  Or crowdsource it.  You want a name that will inspire people to work differently.

Do you have an awesome name for your social intranet?  Please share it in the comments.  (And for the rest of you there is no shame in cloning greatness.)

  This post was written in memory of Zella, the beautiful and hostile cat, whom we lost this week.

It's #SocialFriday Y'all (aka how to eliminate email)

So you've deployed your social business platform internally, you've built in the business value, worked on formal communications and education, but are still having troubles breaking some folks of the email habit.  (And here's why you should care.)  This is a story of a viral technique that worked for me that you might want to give a go.

I was an internal social evangelist at a company that had a high number of power-users but like many organizations there were certain departments that tended to be less active participants than others.  And as we continued to bring new team members on board we needed to make sure they saw how deeply ingrained social was in our organization.  We were very social at our company however the point of #SocialFriday was to eliminate all email unless it was external or truly confidential.  It’s just a matter of showing benefits in order to get people to break the email habit that has been beaten into us for 20+ years.

The genesis of #SocialFriday happened at a customer site.  Ronnie (PM extraordinaire) and I were onsite working with the customer project team which included Vinicius and Ryan.  As an exercise we walked through Vinicius’s email inbox to see how much was truly confidential and how much would have benefited the larger community.  About 90% of his email could have been eliminated.  Some of the discussions still would have needed to happen but by happening in a community there would have been more transparency.  Other discussions would have been simply eliminated because Vinicius may not have cared about that particular message and would have chosen not to follow that community / channel.  The other portion of email that could have been eliminated was because there were multiple branches growing from an original email root and it was hard to tell which ones he needed to save in order to stay on topic.  We started talking about ways to get people out of email so that the knowledge would be shared and captured for current and future employees (think project status or an answer about the best temperature at which to melt cheese - yes, cheese).  Ryan had the great idea of turning on his internal Out of Office message in Outlook and forcing people to communicate with him in the activity stream/microblog.  Since the customer hadn’t deployed at that point it was just at the brainstorming phase for them.



Well Ronnie, PM extraordinaire, took the brainstorming session to heart and started turning on his Out of Office message on Fridays.  Many of us soon followed suit.  Here’s my OOO message:

It’s #SocialFriday y’all.  I've purposely turned on my out of office for internal emails.  I will be participating in an activity to help dramatically reduce email and increase transparency with what's happening in our accounts and in the solutions consulting organization.  If you need me, don’t expect a response via email today unless your message is truly confidential.  You can target me @christys in your activity stream.  If this is customer-related please target the customer community as well. 
I hope you join me in the #SocialFriday effort!

It got to the point that many people’s OOO messages just said something Zen like “Find me in the stream”.

I didn't turn on my OOO the other days of the week (in fact I eventually stopped altogether) but if I did get an internal email I’d often answer it in the activity stream, targeted at the person who asked.  The increased transparency benefited everyone.  At one point I received an email from one of our sales reps about how we were using a certain product feature at a customer deployment.  Instead of answering via email I answered in the customer community and targeted the sales rep.  Lo and behold our VP of Product saw the comment and chimed in that we were about to release a new feature and if we made a small tweak it could benefit the customer in the use case I had described.  Did I think the customer would use it?  Yes, please!  If I had simply responded to the one person in email it would have ended there.  Instead we made a customer happy with a new feature I didn’t even know was in the works.  That’s pretty cool.

So yeah, we started our #SocialFriday effort to eliminate the majority of internal email but it turned into #AllSocialAllTheTime.  It just goes to show that a little reinforcement never hurts even in the most socially savvy organizations.

What about you?  Any tips to share on how you are changing behaviors to take advantage of social business in your organization?

The Importance of Social Business Value

Adoption is important in order to see value from social business tools.  Adoption should never be the end goal though;  usage statistics are signposts along the way toward what should be your real goal of business value.  It’s easy to rely on adoption or usage statistics as success criteria but if you stop there you are selling yourself short.  Why did you choose to implement social business tools in your organization in the first place?  Are you trying to improve communications, collaboration, and innovation?  If so, what does that mean in your company?  How does that affect your business?  What sort of measurements can you put in place to measure success?  Optimized production, increased revenues, decreased travel costs, improved customer satisfaction, decreased downtime – those are all end goals you can aim for depending on your industry and what’s important to your business.

Adoption isn’t a success measurement but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.  If your end goal is to increase cross-selling in your sales organization thereby increasing revenues, well, you had better make sure there’s adoption on the sales team.  If you are trying to reduce call escalations in the call center, a good part of your adoption efforts should focus on the call center.  I’m not saying you should ignore the rest of the organization but success breeds success leading to viral adoption in other parts of the organization.  Focus on some key successes and others will follow.

Recently I was on site with a customer during their social business platform launch.  We had been planning for a while and this was when it all fell into place.  End-users would finally be accessing the new tools in production.  This particular customer followed the recommendation of identifying a few key areas of the business where they knew social could have high business impact for them and then we gave those groups the white glove treatment*.  The white glove treatment means:

• We spent time with key stakeholders from the groups ahead of time understanding their business and their goals.
• We ran use case discovery workshops with representatives from the groups to understand how they currently communicate and collaborate, what their pain points are, how they’d like to be able to work, and what the potential obstacles might be.
• Post workshop we mapped out the right tools and processes to match the problems (and didn’t fix anything that wasn’t broken just to make it social)
• We spent extra time with the community managers of each group to migrate any existing content and to configure their communities to meet their needs.  We also trained the community managers in engagement techniques, specifically to the needs and potential obstacles we heard during the workshops.
• We ran in-person launch “tours” to small groups of end-users, by specific group so we could focus on their use cases so that the stories resonated with the individuals.

I was extremely happy with how well these sessions went last week.  One of the potential obstacles that we ran into during the use case development workshops (these are oil & gas engineers by the way) was that some of them felt that social tools would be a waste of time.  Many of the engineers don’t use social tools in their personal lives and couldn’t picture using them at work.  They were fine with picking up the phone, leaving a voice mail, and waiting on an answer.  During the launch tours last week the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.  Engineers are a smart bunch and when they see a better way of handling a process they get it.  At the end of two days the level of Q&A and knowledge sharing happening within the engineering communities surprised me in a positive way. I knew it would happen but it happened even faster than I expected.  Without the white glove treatment (which includes good community managers and sponsors) the community would still have taken off but not at this rate and with this level of quality conversation and problem solving.

I’m the first one to admit that the white glove treatment isn’t scalable and frankly isn’t necessary for every single group in your organization.  However, for those groups upon which you are relying to take your company forward and make a difference in the way that you do business, the white glove treatment is essential in ramping up the “what’s in it for me” to the end-user, which amps up adoption, which in turn delivers that business value to your organization.


*Thank you, Cristina, for the term “white glove treatment”.

Kudos to You

(I originally published this on the NewsGator blog but given today's CMSWire #socbizchat on Employee Engagement I thought it was appropriate to re-post.)

According to Gallup “Actively disengaged employees erode an organization's bottom line while breaking the spirits of colleagues in the process. Within the U.S. workforce, Gallup estimates this cost to be more than $300 billion in lost productivity alone.”¹  And that’s just the disengaged employees who stay at the company.  What about the ones who leave?  Many companies I work with have found that their highest attrition rates are with employees who have been with the company for less than 5 years.  That’s the group with whom they haven’t yet had the chance to recoup their recruiting and training costs.  Lower your attrition rates and you lower your recruiting and training expenses.  These are just two reasons to make sure you have engaged employees.

One of things that Gallup asks participants to rank in their Employee Engagement survey² is “In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work”.   Receiving recognition for a job well done is a key indicator (one of Gallup’s 12 key indicators) of employee engagement.  According to Richard Florida in The Rise of the Creative Class (I interpret “creative” to mean “innovative”) modern workers are motivated significantly by peer recognition³.   Who doesn’t like getting a pat on the back?

So where am I going with this?  Well, I use the stats to back up the use of Kudos badges within an organization.  These are badges (depending on your social business platform) that anyone in the company can give to anyone else by going to that person’s profile on the intranet, choosing an icon that matches the reason for recognition, and adding a description of why you are giving this person a Kudo.  I gave a Kudos badge to a co-worker and it looked like this:

Hopefully this made Brian feel good to be recognized for the work he does.  I also targeted his manager and his manager’s manager, to make sure they knew what the customer had said and to reinforce that Brian rocks.  One of the reasons peer-to-peer recognition is so important is that peers are often closer to the work a person is doing than the manager is.  This isn’t the first time I’ve given a Kudos badge but for some reason something really struck me this time.  You want to know what I found?  Giving the kudos made me feel good too.  This doesn’t mean I’m going to go on a random Kudos-giving binge to everyone for managing to wear matching socks.  It might mean though that I’m more likely to give a Kudos badge the next time someone stands out by doing an excellent job.  And if I do it more often others will too.  And if the theory is true that one of our significant drivers is peer recognition, that might just mean we are all more likely to exceed expectations on a regular basis.

What would be interesting is to tie Kudos into our performance reviews.  They could be a virtual take on 360 degree inputs. 

What about you?  How are you driving peer-to-peer recognition?  Have you tied social into existing processes like performance reviews?

1.  http://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/121535/Employee-Engagement-Overview-Brochure.aspx  page 1, last paragraph

2.  hhttp://www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/121535/Employee-Engagement-Overview-Brochure.aspx  page 2

3.  http://www.peoplemetrics.com/blog/5-tips-3-approaches-for-encouraging-peer-to-peer-recognition/

Why Social Collaboration is Better than Email

As a social business consultant working with companies to implement internal social business initiatives I run into many of the same questions at every company where I'm working.  One of those questions is always "I get my job done just fine using email.  Why do I need to change something that works well for me?"  Sometimes that question comes from the rank and file, sometimes it comes from one of the company leaders.  I'm always glad to hear the question voiced because even if it's not getting voiced I know some people are thinking it.  If the question is voiced I get a chance to directly address it in conversation.

 
Here are some of my reasons why collaborating is much better served using social business tools rather than email:

1. Email is where knowledge goes to die.*  If I have a question and email the person who I think knows the answer, I may get an answer from that person, but I'm the only person who benefits from the answer.  Odds are that the person who answered the question, being a SME, has to answer the same questions quite frequently.  If, instead of asking the question via email in a 1:1 situation, I ask the question in a community, the same SME can answer the question once, everyone in the community can benefit from the answer at the time, and future community members can benefit from the answer later because the knowledge has been captured and becomes searchable and findable.  In contrast I can't search anyone else's email box.
2. I broaden my scope when I ask a question in a community rather than via email.  I can only know so many people.  So when I ask a question via email I'm limiting myself to potential experts.  Often times the two people I send my email to don't know the answer and so they pass it on to two more people who pass on to the three people who are able to answer my question.  That takes time.  By asking a question in a community I automatically broaden my scope of potential experts and can get a faster, potentially better answer than I would have received via email.
3. Attachments.  How many times have you started iterating on a document someone sent to you via email only to find out it's not the latest version?  By always saving the latest version in the proper community, editing it there, and getting notified of edits via your activity stream you no longer have to worry about multiple version of docs floating around out there.
4. The multiple tree branched email.  Someone starts an email with a long distribution list.  Someone hits reply to all and responds.  Someone else hits reply to all to the original email.  Thus starts the genesis of the multi-branched email thread where you have to track which version of the email you've read and which ones you need to respond to.  By keeping the conversation in a microblog conversation or discussion you keep it single threaded and always know to what you are responding.  Better yet, you get updates in your activity stream so you don't have to check for when there's something new.
5. Subscription Model.  Community members can subscribe to topics or areas of interest, rather than getting spammed by being on an email distribution list.**

 
What else would you add? 


*This is a quote from Bill French in a 2003 blog post about portal technology that was one of my favorites.  Alas, the blog post is no longer live.
**Thanks to my brilliant friend @mor_trisha for this one.

The Adoption Blindspot

You probably hear people talk about deploying a social business solution in your organization as a journey.  I'm one of those people.  Deploying social in your organization is not a quick trip to grandmother's house rather it's going on the road to follow Phish.  There are stops along the way, it never really ends, sometimes it's smelly, but it's all worth it for the shared brilliance.
 
Anyhoodle, you are on this journey and at some point you or someone above you (like the person who ponied up the resources for the project) want to know how you are doing.  The easiest number to quote is an adoption rate.  Here there be dragons.  Adoption for adoption's sake should not be your success measure.  The usage statistics that tend to fall under adoption, like # posts, unique visitors, # comments, and all of those relatively easy statistics to pull (and so the most often used when a sponsor asks about progress) don't matter in the end.  90% adoption doesn't mean anything in the end if all everyone is doing is participating in a ballroom dancing community.  (Granted if your only business goal is adoption then that number does matter, but I have yet to run into a large corporation whose only business goal is employee engagement.)


 
Usage statistics and adoption numbers are signposts along the journey.  They can help you understand if you are still headed in the right direction.  They should never be your end goal.  When your fundor asks 12 months later for the results of deploying social business in your organization, she will want to know results against real business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).  How has the company benefited as a result of its investment?  The McKinsey Group provides a great starting point for you.  Every year for the last few years they have surveyed companies that have deployed social business tools within their organizations and shared the business results these organizations are seeing.*  These results include:

• Increased speed of access to knowledge
• Reduced communications costs
• Increased speed of access to experts
• Decreased travel costs
• Increased employee satisfaction
• Reduced operational costs
• Reduced time to market for products / services
• Increased number of successful innovations for new products / services
• Increased revenue

If you set your specific end goals in the beginning, based on these types of business KPIs, it helps set the direction of your journey and set measurement baselines.  Of course adoption is important - if no one uses your new solution you won't hit your business goals.  Just don't get stuck focusing only on adoption - it will sit there in your blind spot and get in the way when you need to be more agile in order to hit your end goals.
 
What sort of KPIs are you measuring in your organization?
 
 
*The McKinsey Global Institute published a great paper last year that does a bit of a recap from the last few years of data from this annual survey.  You can check it out here.

The Importance of Education for Social Business Success

Education (formerly known as training) is an important piece to any internal Social Business adoption strategy.  I say “formerly known as training” for a couple of reasons.  One is that is the word "training" conjures up negative images of people sitting through hours of classroom sessions.  The second reason is that training has received a bad rap in the social business world. 

 

There's a philosophy that a good social business solution should be so intuitive, like it is in the consumer world, that training isn’t necessary.  I don’t completely agree with that philosophy.  First of all, consumer social media tools aren't as intuitive as people who have been using them for a while think they are.  I consider myself savvy but when I first started using Twitter I had to actively search out what RT, FF and hashtags were.  (As you can see in my very first tweet here, I hadn't figured those things out yet.)

 

 

 

 

Secondly, there's a large percentage of the user base in every one of the F500 companies I've worked with over the last 6 years that has never used any of the consumer Web 2.0 tools.  That means many of the concepts behind communities, microblogging, activity streams, ideation, etc., are completely new to them.  That segment of your audience needs to learn the concepts before they can figure out an intuitive interface.

 

More important beyond the concepts and clicks is the WHY.  If I work in sales WHY would I care to change the way I work to start using this new collaboration platform?  If I work in R&D how does it benefit me to start following another researcher in my organization that I’ve never met before?  Sell me before you tell me.  If you don’t get buy-in from your end-users before you show them a few things about where to click they will never use your system (except for your early-adopters).

 

I’ve found four main types of education to be important:

1. At the launch of your new platform.  It's a no-brainer to promote your new platform and educate people on what they can do with it and why they should care.  (I'm not talking about long, intensive classroom training sessions.  These can be voluntary townhalls, short videos, webinars, hand-outs, staffed tables in the cafeteria - whatever channels work best for your organization.)
2. 1x1 hands-on-sessions for executives.  Enable your executives to lead by example.  Admit it or not some of them may be intimidated by the new tools or may not understand the benefits of the new platform.  And they don't have time to figure it out on their own.  The more leaders with whom you can spend just 30 minutes, the more quickly they can start engaging and seeing business value. 
3. On-boarding.  As you bring new employees into the organization don’t forget to educate them about this great resource you are providing to them.  I prefer to have the hiring manager take the employee on a quick tour of the platform from that job role's perspective.  If the hiring managers can't fit this in then getting a script into the onboarding team's hands is important.  Either way getting a tour of the social platform incorporated into the onboarding process gets the new employees onboarded into the company culture and accessing company resources much more quickly than otherwise.
4. Ongoing as you iterate.  Both the beauty and a sometime challenge of a social business platform is you are never completely done with implementation.   You will regularly be adding to and refining your social business platform based on new capabilities, business needs, and employee feedback.  As you iterate, educate your users on what’s available to them and how they might make use of it.  HOW to use it might be obvious but WHY they should use it might not be.

 

Lastly, this isn’t a formal education initiative and so I’m not including it in my list of three, but make it easy for employees to share their successes.  Let them educate each other about new ways they’ve found to use the platform to save time, find info, innovate, etc.  Peers trust peers (look at Yelp) and so they may be more likely to try something recommended by a peer rather than by their managers or IT.

A little education about what’s in it for them can go a long way to driving adoption of Social Business within your organization.

 

Which educational methods have you found to be most successful in your social business initiatives?

 

 

P.S.  And since I'm talking about Education and not Training - I didn't list out important items like ongoing training for Community Managers, Help Desk, etc., that take a more formal, deeper functional dive, which I still categorize as Training.  I'm splitting hairs, I know. :)